When Google follows you around and gives you helpful articles
Your Google Translate phrases will influence your Google personalized newsfeed
Start a fun digital whiteboard for remote workers
With so many of us working remotely, we miss the small little things about sharing a common physical space. Things like the office whiteboard.
Flashback to the 1985 internet—but not really
While browsing through a PDF of a 1985 Chicago Tribune, I thought, “this is what the internet was like in 1985”
The social network “Minus” is remarkably thoughtful
If you enjoy contemplative places online, give Minus a try.
Does a tiny box yield tiny thoughts?
That Twitter composition box. The small field allows for only 280 characters. Is that restricting?
How do podcasts fit within your life these days
What I wrote in the New York Times survey for how I listen to podcasts.
Listening to a podcast and music at the same time
Have you ever listened to music and a podcast at the same time?
How to improve a $10 headset/mic for video calls
Test the position of the mic, and use a microphone fuzzy.
How to view mostly love on Twitter
If you ever need an injection of positiveness, try this Twitter trick that’ll show tweets with the word “love” from people you follow.
Highlight and annotate articles online with Hypothesis
In our age of reading everything online, do you ever miss underlining and annotating in print? Here’s a solution that I use.
Question of the day on a whiteboard
I love reading 14 kindergarteners’ response to the question of the day
Copy current YYYYMMDD_HHMM timestamp to your clipboard (using Applescript)
Whenever I need to type in a timestamp, I just click on my handy app in the dock.
Twitter usernames are still limited to under 15 characters
Twitter let me sign up using the name @christiannnotebook but then automatically shortened it to @christiannoteb2 without me knowing during the signup process.
Keeping a development diary for each project
Do you ever use Markdown? In the past 2.5 years since I’ve been doing development work at Tribune, I keep a running log/diary/scratchpad of the progress and my thought process. I was keeping that as a doc in Google Drive. Now I’m writing it as plain text in Markdown format, so the log/diary/scratchpad is lighter. …
Funny story about my 5-year-old coworker
During a weekly project call on Monday, our developer asked about a particular feature on the wireframes I designed. The feature is on the existing site we are reconstructing. But this morning I couldn’t find that feature. I started to draft a response to our developer to say to kill that feature. Just now my …
Google finally eliminates email subscriptions from Feedburner
Today Google sent me a reminder email that they will be eliminating email subscriptions from Feedburner. Once upon a time I used Feedburner to send email newsletters from spudart.org. This was before Google owned Feedburner. Feedburner started in 2004. Google bought them in 2007. I must have started using Feedburner sometime between those years. Google …
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Ad blockers
I installed an ad blocker to block the tracking scripts on baseball-reference.com. Every time I visit that site, my computer’s fans would spin up crazy. I really don’t mind seeing the ads. No video ads. Actually, I don’t even know what ads they were, because I never really noticed them. What I do mind is …
Being a designer is empowering
One of the things I love about being a designer is being able to simply do things myself. I wanted to try some graph paper. My first thought was go to Amazon to buy a pack. But then I realized, “I could just make my own in Illustrator!” To my exact specs and color.
My first Stack Overflow answer
For years I have been a lurker on Stack Overflow. I often hit up the site for answers. I couldn’t upvote anything, because I never posted anything. (You need some upvotes before you can leave an upvote). The site remained mostly like a book for me. I would read it for answers. But I couldn’t …